Sometimes I just wanted to kiss him so bad.
I came home in tears on the last day of eighth grade, having walked in on Cas making out with Molly McDowell in the home ec room after school. Molly McDowell had long, curly hair like a Disney princess, and she played on the volleyball team, and she was always wearing the thing you were trying to get your mom to buy you. Nothing about the situation should’ve surprised me—obviously someone as cool as Molly and someone as cool as Cas would pull each other into their respective orbits—but it still surprised, and it still stung.
My mom poured me a glass of milk, squeezed in a healthy dose of chocolate syrup, and told me that this just wasn’t the universe where Cas and I were right for each other, simple as that. Maybe in another time or place, maybe if he were different or if I were different.
“But you don’t want to make yourself different for a boy,” she said. “You don’t want to make yourself different for anyone.”
My reply was something halfway between a sob and “You just don’t get it.” But my mother persisted.
“Someday someone will like you for you, just the way you are. And as much as you like Cas, this other person will be so much better for you.”
That didn’t cut it at the time. I sobbed through the glass of chocolate milk, went upstairs, blasted the radio, and hid under the blankets in bed, hating Cas and Molly and the world.
It’s silly, but even at this point, even at dumb postgame house parties, even knowing that Cas had now gone so much further than home ec room French kissing with girls like Molly McDowell, the image of them together still grabbed me in the stomach every so often. Just a quick little spasm, somewhere below the rib cage, that made me feel like I was in middle school again, and made me long for that universe out there where Cas and I were together, and hate the one where we weren’t.
But I would never admit that. I just smiled back, and we shuffled down the sidewalk toward my car, Cas with his hands in his pockets and me with my eyes toward the sky. It was a beautiful night.
We reached my car, which was a shameful distance from the curb and sticking into the street at a really awkward angle. I couldn’t parallel park to save my life.
“Drive safe, okay?” Cas said as he took the keys out of my hand and unlocked the door.
“Oh, I was planning on driving recklessly.”
Cas clutched a hand to his chest.
“Senioritis?” I asked wryly.
“Just picturing the world without Devon Tennyson. The sky’s all black and torn open, and trees shrivel and die, and all the top-forty bands break up.”
“You notice how we never have conversations grounded in reality?”
He grinned. “I love you.”
I got into the car, half wanting to tell him not to say stuff like that and half wanting to say it back.
“Drive safe for real, okay?” he said before I could reply.
“Well, I was going to give it go blindfolded, but I guess I could wait on that. For you.”
I knew that was just as stupid as Cas’s As long as you save me a dance. And I knew that sometimes around Cas my voice turned strange, too, some sort of gravel jumped into it, trying to sound cool and sexy and cavalier but really sounding just as idiotic as Cas had talking to Lindsay. But I couldn’t help it.
He rapped the roof of the car. “Night, Devon.” And then he shut the door, moved onto the curb, and watched me pull away.
5
The second week of school is decidedly worse than the first, most especially in senior year. The first week can have its novelties: seeing who changed their hair color, who bulked up over the summer. There are new faces to familiarize yourself with. New privileges to grow accustomed to.